On Sat, 2010-05-15 at 11:01 +0200, Richard Zidlicky wrote: > of course, and I do not think it is so hard to think of a sensible behaviour. > > After each (semi)automatic change to grub/kernel conf as well as for the very first > boot there should be a timeout as well as visible menu. > Once the kernel did boot with default command line etc it would be safe to set > the timeout to a small value - after asking the user. > > More elaborate solution, there could be two config values - quicktimeout and > safetimout. > After kernel and config changes timeout would be changed to safetimout and once > the kernel booted safely it could be reset to quicktimeout automatically. Neat idea. But if a breaking kernel change somehow occurs without triggering the change to the safetimeout, we would not want the user to be completely stuck. I see two ways to address that: - Make quicktimeout nonzero enough that the user has time to react. - When grub attempts booting with quicktimeout, have it change to safetimeout. Then have an initscript that changes back to quicktimeout once booting has succeeded. Grub already has a "default boot entry" field in the stage2 image that can be written by boot commands for exactly this purpose; see the info docs. The same could be done for the timeout. (This would appear to be a common trick: my Dell Latitude D620's BIOS does the same thing with the power-on self test.) -- Matt -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
